my habit of thinking

Tag Archives: anxiety

I often sit and daydream about how it all could go wrong. I could get a devastating disease, special people could suddenly cease to exist, or someone could undermine my efforts for stability and longevity. I guess those are the main categories to fear and ruminate over how I would handle myself through various survival mechanisms. It is one thing to dream up horrifying situations, yet it another when a perfectly rational individual believes that the moment they fear the most is actually happening and could lead them to the devastating end or life situation that they dread most. But that thesis is best saved for a different essay.

In remedy of these intense periods of anxiety, I try to think of equally horrifying situations that I wouldn’t be afraid of. Through this procedure, I have learned that there are horrifying things that I wouldn’t be so devastated over if they actually happened so long as none of my choices were a contributing factor to the outcome. For example, getting an STD would be much worse than having breast cancer considering that the former involved some sort of break down in my decision making, whereas the latter is probably a result of nature being out of my control. Though I guess you could add the nature argument to both cases, but it is clearly more heavily weighted in the breast cancer example unless I willingly to walk into a high radiation zone, which is highly unlikely despite my extremely over-active imagination.

My intense habit of dreaming up bad situations stems from bad things that happened in the past which I felt totally unprepared to properly deal with in the moment. Like all those situations where after the fact you think of all the perfect things you could have said that would have been much better than what you actually said. It is those moments that haunt me because of their sudden heightened occurrence that forced me to deal with everything that was happening in the moment without break or proper time to think it through. All I had on me at the time were the only resources I was capable of using, and even then I wasn’t even aware of all the tools at my disposal.

These situations have caused me much misery over the bad way in which I believe I handled the situation and in this jungle it seems as though my mind needs more training on how to more properly deal with them when they come along again in the future. Until then, I’ll traumatize my inner world in hopes of not feeling so traumatized from the outside world.

I watched a documentary about dreams recently and it got me thinking that perhaps my brain has a love affair with dreaming. I’m often not fully paying attention when I’m awake because my thoughts gravitate to more interesting scenarios which may or may not be actually happening… in other words often my dream world is far more interesting to me than real life. This accounts for much of my behavior like my so called “spaciness” and wanting to be alone so often (I can follow my own train of thought without having to explain it to anyone as well as not have to follow their social rules in the process).

So that is a practical explanation for why I continue to be lost in a daze much of the day. But I am thinking that from a more physical assumption, perhaps I am not fully awake. Like, I am thinking that if our brains have certain genetically programed patterns of sleep that cause dreaming (this specific documentary said that REM sleep is for practicing and preparing for future situations based on data it processed during non-REM sleep) then if I am not fully waking up then my daydreams are running in similar patterns to night dreams. Then anxiety about a made up situation that isn’t a real life danger, would be the day time equivalent of a nightmare.

From this prospective, I can see why people have a difficult time being in a good mood when they worry about stuff that actually will never happen to them. If you can’t always wake yourself up from a nightmare because you think it is really happening, how are you going to wake yourself up from fear…especially when you are convinced that you’ve got to prepare yourself to face this fear?

I think it will help to remind yourself that in your waking life you’ve not always as awake as you think you are.

I might just be a more emotional person, or perhaps I just notice my emotions more than others, not sure which since it seems impossible to really feel what others are feeling. There are many times when I just have the right words to express myself, but sometimes, sometimes I feel something building up and I react to it despite the fact that I don’t know what is causing it or why I am reacting to whatever it is. At this point it is extremely irrational because my conscious mind is reacting to a feeling that hangs over me like a cloud and is unable to see the cloud for what it is.

Traumatic situations cause this for me due to confusion and over analysis of what the hell just happened and, for the most part, time (often a lot of time) gives gradual clarity on the situation perhaps this is so because at least the source (the traumatic event) is identified. So this isn’t the type of situation I am speaking of, it is related, yes, but I’m focusing on undiagnosed feelings that bubble up in the course of everyday normal life events. I am also not speaking of ‘worry.’ Worrying implied that one knows what they are worried about and why they are worried about it. ‘Choosing to worry’ would be a different topic as well because choosing also implies one knows the object of the worry and uses a worry-cycle as some sort of means to an end or crutch in order to inhibit more productive and positive behaviors…this would in turn be, once again, another note that would go into detail of what purpose worrying has in life but I really don’t want to face that reality at the moment…. I have something more important to plop onto facebook for the time being.

I want to say it is anxiety, but I feel the term is used to write off feelings as simply “anxiety’ and thus pacifies people into believing that it is a feeling that they will just have to put up with. I don’t believe that is the correct approach, or, just not my way of approaching it.

This heavy feeling comes of many forms. the most recent that brought my thoughts together was when I was hanging out with a friend and I was kinda overwhelmed with some sort of heavy feeling that made it difficult to focus properly on the present moment and what was going on around me. Half of me could live in the present for the sake of survival, while the other half inside was wanting to step away from the social scene to organize my inner thoughts, which, weren’t thoughts at all, it was a heavy mental feeling disconnected from an particular event or issue going on in my life at the moment, or so I felt at the time, but it held me back from simply being myself in the moment and enjoying my company.

Then, like a flash of light, the heavy feeling is gone, why? How? I was simply able to express it with words and thus diagnose where the root of the feeling was. Once diagnosed it no longer bothered me on a emotional level. It turned into a rational, arguable circumstance, one in which I now understand where I have power over it and where I don’t. This understanding makes all the difference in how the feeling affects me and once in words, I can express it to my fellow bipeds and view it from a more detached, unemotionally reactive state. I am therefore able to recognize the feeling in the future and manage its effects on me (subconsciously to a degree) without going through that initial fuzzy state of confusion.